Richard Cobden, a textile printer by trade, became the foremost opponent of the corn laws. His exploitation of the transport and communication advances of the day-the railroad, telegraph, and penny post-finally led to repeal in 1846.
Tory prime minister Sir Robert Peel eventually saw the wisdom of corn law repeal, famously commenting to his deputy, Sidney Herbert, in response to a speech by Richard Cobden, "You must answer this, for I cannot." This heroic decision, which saved the ruling class of aristocratic landowners from itself, cost him his political career. From the Granger Collection, New York.
This Punch cartoon satirizes the persuasive Richard Cobden's conversion of prime minister Sir Robert Peel toward support of corn law repeal. By cooties., of Punch Limited, London.
After his triumphant 1846 parliamentary victory in the tight over corn law repeal, Richard Cobden turned his attention to the Continent, where he influenced Napoleon III and eventually pushed through the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty, which lowered tariffs between France and England and brought both nations back from the brink of war.

…

Our attorney may enjoy carpentry and decide to do the job himself-a valid emotional choice, but not an economically rational one.)
Alas, Principles, and Ricardo himself, arrived too late to save England from the draconian Corn Law of 1815. In response to a pro-Corn Law tract by Thomas Malthus, Ricardo wrote an anti-Corn Law pamphlet, "An Essay on the Influence of a low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock." In it, he pointed out that the major advantage of the "real" England (as opposed to the hypothetical England of Principles) lay in its factory machinery. The corn laws, he wrote, impeded the purchase of foreign grain and forced England to waste its precious labor in less productive farmwork. This benefited no one except the landowning aristocracy. Ricardo's pamphlet convinced few. His more influential Principles did not appear in print until 1817, and he himself did not enter Parliament until 1819.

…

Commenting on this trade-off, Trefler wrote that the critical question in trade policy is to understand "how freer trade can be implemented in an industrialized economy in a way that recognizes both the long-run gains and the short-term adjustment costs borne by workers and others."3
For almost two decades, economists and politicians have grappled with the problem of how, or even whether, those left behind by free trade should be compensated. In 1825, John Stuart Mill calculated that although the Corn Laws put a certain amount of extra money in the pockets of the landlords, these laws cost the nation as a whole several times more. He theorized that it would be far cheaper to buy the landlords off:
The landlords should make an estimate of their probable losses from the repeal of the Corn Laws, and found upon it a claim to compensation. Some, indeed, may question how far they who, for their own emolument, imposed one of the worst of taxes upon their countrymen [i.e., the Corn Laws], are entitled to compensation for renouncing advantages which they never ought to have enjoyed. It would be better, however, to have a repeal of the Corn Laws, even clogged by a compensation, than to not have it at all; and if this were our only alternative, no one could complain of a change, but which, though an enormous amount of evil would be prevented, no one would lose.32
In other words, it is far cheaper and better for all to directly compensate the losers.

A bad crop in 1816 sent prices flying high. Food riots became
common as workers demanded higher wages to pay for food. In 1819,
there was a massacre as troops opened fire on protesters in Peterloo in
Manchester. Out of 80,000 protesters, 300-400 were killed as the
Lancashire militia charged to tear down banners that read “No Corn
Laws” and “Universal Suffrage.” Pretty racy for 1819. It wouldn’t be
until the formation of the Anti-Corn-Law-League in Manchester in
1839 that the movement against protectionism was formalized. The
Corn Laws were finally struck down in 1846.
Sure, England prospered even with misguided protectionism.
But workers and therefore factory owners were under a lot of strain.
No one in Parliament bothered to figure out the derivative
consequences of protecting landowners, who had very little to do with
the economic engine of the Empire.

…

During the Napoleonic Wars, imports from continental Europe,
especially of foodstuffs such as corn and wheat, were limited. Farmers
planted more of the crops to meet high prices. With victory, a flood of
cheap corn and wheat began to flow into England. In 1804, Parliament
passed a Corn Law putting duties on foreign corn, although this wasn’t
new; laws and duties of this sort have been imposed on and off since
the late 17th century.
In 1815, with Napoleon truly defeated, wheat prices dropped
by half. Landowners, who were the ones really represented in
Parliament, fought for and won the passage of additional Corn Laws,
which set a minimum price on wheat below which, duties were
imposed. By now, England had industrialized, and workers were jam
packed into cities with no ability to grow their own food. They
protested the increase in the subsequent price of bread and demanded
higher wages from factory owners.

…

Inflation raged throughout the Restriction period, up until
1814, helping the Bullionist’s argument that a strong gold standard
would hold off inflation. But there was a war on, so the economy was
working overtime to supply both the military and the regular economy,
and it was hard to keep prices from going up.
***
The protectionist Corn Laws were inflationary. Workers
demanded higher wages to pay for higher food costs. Add to that the
unrestricted loans from banks, which increased the money supply, and
it was no wonder that inflation was rampant during Napoleonic War
England. Peel, who had implemented the Bank Restriction halting
convertibility, knew something had to be done. But he couldn’t pass
anything through Parliament, to either cancel the Corn Laws, which
would hurt landowners, or restrict bank loans, which would hurt
bankers.
Peel turned to gold for the magic he needed to kill inflation. He
put together a Bullion Committee filled with, you guessed it, Bullionists
who pushed through a repeal of Restriction, meaning a return to
convertibility.

And so when the 1815 Corn Law was pushed through the House, it was, perhaps, the last time the landowning class in England actually controlled a political decision.
The Anti-Corn Law League was founded in 1839. Its platform was simple: the League accused the protectionist system of having nothing to do with keeping down the price of bread but allowing landowners to get the best prices. Equally, cheap food meant a contented people and, in some ways, really did suppress the need for wage demands. There was also the possibility of counter protection laws in other countries – that is, export markets. This did not cheer the landowners, which was something of a dilemma for Peel who had a reputation for doing nothing until he had to. But the Anti-Corn Law League would not go away until the Corn Laws had. Moreover, the League was politically savvy.

…

The question in debate may have started with land-owning classes, but it would finish with more urban debate. The question of the Corn Laws had been around for generations; they had existed in one form or another since the Middle Ages. They were protectionist laws that imposed duties on cheap corn imports to protect British grain prices. In 1815 a Corn Law banned imports until British grain had reached a certain price, indeed, an artificially high price. It was unworkable and a sliding scale was introduced, but not for a decade. But the significance of that law had nothing to do with whether it worked or not.
The Whigs controlled the interests of the majority of political decision-makers and the one interest the Whigs had in common was that they were landowners. It would not matter how many times the Corn Laws became an issue, the Whigs would never repeal them. Nor would Peel’s own landowning Tories.

…

In fact, this threat of something more than legislative action may have directly encouraged Peel to agree to get rid of the Corn Laws. His obvious difficulty was that a large number of his political group were landowners. In August 1845, the potato crop failed in Ireland and Peel knew that if he were to stay in command he had to put the Corn Law reform – in reality, its abolition – to his Cabinet. He did not get the support he had expected and so he went down. His resignation was a formal affair because the person who could have formed a new administration, the Whig Lord Russell, would not do so. Peel returned. However, the protectionists were waiting for him whatever the damage they might do to the Tories, that is, to their own people. This fight to stop the repeal of the Corn Laws would strip the Tories of any cohesion Peel had hoped to preserve.

He became convinced that there was no alternative but to abolish the Corn Laws altogether, a reversal of his government’s policy. At first he was unable to persuade his political colleagues, but some of them changed their minds as the news from Ireland worsened and it became apparent that the survival of the government itself was at stake. Finally, with a vote in May 1846, the Corn Laws were repealed. The support of the Duke of Wellington, an aristocratic war hero who had long been a strong supporter of the Corn Laws, was crucial. He persuaded the landowners who sat in the House of Lords to back the repeal on the grounds that the survival of the government was more important. But he privately conceded that “those damned rotten potatoes” were to blame for the demise of the Corn Laws.
The lifting of the tariff on imported grain opened the way for imports of maize from America, though in the event the government mishandled the aid effort and it made little difference to the situation in Ireland.

…

Industrialists also hoped that cheaper food would leave people with more money to spend on manufactured goods. And they favored abolition of the Corn Laws because it would advance the cause of “free trade” in general, ensuring easy access to imported raw materials on one hand, and export markets for manufactured goods on the other. The debate over the Corn Laws was, in short, a microcosm of the much larger fights between agriculture and industry, protectionism and free trade. Was Britain a nation of farmers or industrialists? Since the landowners controlled Parliament, the argument had raged throughout the 1820s and 1830s to little effect.
The outcome was determined by the potato, as the famine in Ireland brought matters to a head. Peel, who had vigorously opposed the abolition of the Corn Laws in a Parliamentary debate in June 1845, realized that suspending the tariff on imports to Ireland in order to relieve the famine, but keeping it in place elsewhere, would cause massive unrest in England, where people would still have to pay artificially high prices.

…

As the magnitude of the disaster became apparent in late 1845, the British prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, found himself in a difficult situation. The obvious response to the famine was to import grain from abroad to relieve the situation in Ireland. The problem was that such imports were at the time subject by law to a heavy import duty to ensure that homegrown grain would always cost less, thus protecting domestic producers from cheap imports. The Corn Laws, as they were known, were at the heart of a long-running debate that had pitted the aristocratic landowners, who wanted the laws to stay in place, against an alliance of opponents led by industrialists, who demanded their abolition.
The landowners argued that it was better to rely on homegrown wheat than unreliable foreign imports, and warned that farmers would lose their jobs; they left unspoken their real concern, which was that competition from cheap imports would force them to reduce the rents they charged the farmers who worked their land.

Ricardo’s theory is, thus seen, for those who accept the status quo but not for those who want to change it.
The big change in British trade policy came in 1846, when the Corn Laws were repealed and tariffs on many manufacturing goods were abolished. Free trade economists today like to portray the repeal of the Corn Laws as the ultimate victory of Adam Smith’s and David Ricardo’s wisdom over wrong-headed mercantilism.19 The leading free trade economist of our time, Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University, calls this a ‘historic transition’.20
However, many historians familiar with the period point out that making food cheaper was only one aim of the anti-Corn Law campaigners. It was also an act of ‘free trade imperialism’ intended to ‘halt the move to industrialisation on the Continent by enlarging the market for agricultural produce and primary materials’.21 By opening its domestic agricultural market wider, Britain wanted to lure its competitors back into agriculture.

…

It was also an act of ‘free trade imperialism’ intended to ‘halt the move to industrialisation on the Continent by enlarging the market for agricultural produce and primary materials’.21 By opening its domestic agricultural market wider, Britain wanted to lure its competitors back into agriculture. Indeed, the leader of the anti-Corn Law movement, Richard Cobden, argued that, without the Corn Laws: ‘The factory system would, in all probability, not have taken place in America and Germany. It most certainly could not have flourished, as it has done, both in these states, and in France, Belgium and Switzerland, through the fostering bounties which the high-priced food of the British artisan has offered to the cheaper fed manufacturer of those countries’.22 In the same spirit, in 1840, John Bowring of the Board of Trade, a key member of the anti-Corn Law League, explicitly advised the member states of the German Zollverein (Custom Union) to specialize in growing wheat and sell the wheat to buy British manufactures.23 Moreover, it was not until 1860 that tariffs were completely abolished.

…

British manufacturers correctly perceived that free trade was now in their interest and started campaigning for it (having said that, they naturally remained quite happy to restrict trade when it suited them, as the cotton manufacturers did when it came to the export of textile machinery that might help foreign competitors). In particular, the manufacturers agitated for the abolition of the Corn Laws that limited the country’s ability to import cheap grains. Cheaper food was important to them because it could lower wages and raise profits.
The anti-Corn Law campaign was crucially helped by the economist, politician and stock-market player, David Ricardo.Ricardo came up with the theory of comparative advantage that still forms the core of free trade theory. Before Ricardo, people thought foreign trade makes sense only when a country can make something more cheaply than its trading partner.

Ricardo’s theory is, thus seen, for those who accept the status quo but not for those who want to change it.
The big change in British trade policy came in 1846, when the Corn Laws were repealed and tariffs on many manufacturing goods were abolished. Free trade economists today like to portray the repeal of the Corn Laws as the ultimate victory of Adam Smith’s and David Ricardo’s wisdom over wrong-headed mercantilism.19 The leading free trade economist of our time, Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University, calls this a ‘historic transition’.20
However, many historians familiar with the period point out that making food cheaper was only one aim of the anti-Corn Law campaigners. It was also an act of ‘free trade imperialism’ intended to ‘halt the move to industrialisation on the Continent by enlarging the market for agricultural produce and primary materials’.21 By opening its domestic agricultural market wider, Britain wanted to lure its competitors back into agriculture.

…

It was also an act of ‘free trade imperialism’ intended to ‘halt the move to industrialisation on the Continent by enlarging the market for agricultural produce and primary materials’.21 By opening its domestic agricultural market wider, Britain wanted to lure its competitors back into agriculture. Indeed, the leader of the anti-Corn Law movement, Richard Cobden, argued that, without the Corn Laws: ‘The factory system would, in all probability, not have taken place in America and Germany. It most certainly could not have flourished, as it has done, both in these states, and in France, Belgium and Switzerland, through the fostering bounties which the high-priced food of the British artisan has offered to the cheaper fed manufacturer of those countries’.22 In the same spirit, in 1840, John Bowring of the Board of Trade, a key member of the anti-Corn Law League, explicitly advised the member states of the German Zollverein (Customs Union) to specialize in growing wheat and sell the wheat to buy British manufactures.23 Moreover, it was not until 1860 that tariffs were completely abolished.

…

British manufacturers correctly perceived that free trade was now in their interest and started campaigning for it (having said that, they naturally remained quite happy to restrict trade when it suited them, as the cotton manufacturers did when it came to the export of textile machinery that might help foreign competitors). In particular, the manufacturers agitated for the abolition of the Corn Laws that limited the country’s ability to import cheap grains. Cheaper food was important to them because it could lower wages and raise profits.
The anti-Corn Law campaign was crucially helped by the economist, politician and stock-market player, David Ricardo. Ricardo came up with the theory of comparative advantage that still forms the core of free trade theory. Before Ricardo, people thought foreign trade makes sense only when a country can make something more cheaply than its trading partner.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages
by
Carlota Pérez

The Turning Point: Rethinking and Rerouting Development
The notion of a ‘turning point’ is a conceptual device to represent the fundamental changes required to move the economy from a Frenzy mode, shaped
by financial criteria, to a Synergy mode, solidly based on growing production
capabilities. The turning point then is neither an event nor a phase; it is a
process of contextual change. It can take any amount of time, from a few months
to several years, it can be marked by clear-cut events such as the Bretton Woods
meetings, enabling the orderly international Deployment of the fourth surge,
or the repeal of the Corn Laws in Britain, facilitating the Synergy of the second. It could also be happening in the background with a series of changes that
seem to come together as deployment begins.
The turning point has to do with the balance between individual and social
interests within capitalism. It is the swing of the pendulum from the extreme
individualism of Frenzy to giving greater attention to collective well being,
usually through the regulatory intervention of the state and the active participation of other forms of civil society.

…

Those who reaped
the full benefits of the ‘golden age’ (or of the gilded one) continue to hold on
to their belief in the virtues of the system and to proclaim eternal and unstoppable progress, in a complacent blindness, which could be called the ‘Great
Society syndrome’. But the unfulfilled promises had been piling up, while
most people nurtured the expectation of personal and social advance. The result is an increasing socio-political split.
The acts of machine breaking (Luddism) of the 1810s or the protests against
the Corn Laws and demands for universal suffrage that led to the ‘Peterloo’
massacre in Britain in 1819 are widely separated historically and ideologically
from the violent protests of May 1968 in the main countries of continental
Europe.70 However, the dissatisfaction and frustration driving them both is of
a fundamentally similar origin: capitalism had been making too many promises about social progress and not delivering enough, showing too much capacity for wealth creation and not distributing enough.

…

After the railway panic of 1847, suspension of the Act
was seen as necessary, and continued to be the ‘accepted practice’ in emergencies.208
Some rules help strengthen firms; others reinforce market growth and social cohesion. The admission of private joint-stock banks to the London Clearing House fostered the development of networks of branch banks to take advantage of the railway. In 1842 and 1844, laws were enacted improving conditions of work in mines and factories. In 1846 came the crucial decision finally
to repeal the Corn Laws, and fully establish free trade. All this had happened
206. The Financial Times (2002a).
207. Wessel (2002).
208. Kindleberger (1978:1996) p. 149.
130
Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
in the last years of the installation period and opened the way for the Victorian
Synergy to follow.209
At that time in Britain, however, wealth was still mainly in the hands of
aristocrats and merchants.

Cost gravity can't be stopped, except by burning the libraries and murdering every person with an education, and even that only pauses things for a generation. It has been tried in Soviet Russia, Uganda, Cambodia, Rwanda, and North Korea.
As the official site of the UK Parliament notes about the Anti-Corn-Law League in the late-1800's: "Growing pressure for reform of parliament in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to a series of Reform Acts which extended the electoral franchise to most men (over 21) in 1867." The repeal of the Corn Laws was just one part of a wholesale transfer of power from the old to the new. The same will happen in the post-industrial world.
Chapter 1. Magic Machines
Far away, in a different place, a civilization called Culture had taken seed, and was growing. It owned little except a magic spell called Knowledge.

…

The emperor's old toy doesn't look disruptive until it's in the hands of millions. Then come the laws banning, controlling, and restricting it. Horses only for the nobles. Books only for the priests. As we'll see, these attempts to control and restrict the technology of the Digital Revolution are central to our story.
In 1815, as the Industrial Revolution peaked, British landowners (the old money) enacted the Corn Laws to block the transfer of power to the new middle classes by taxing industrialization. The historian David Cody writes, "After a lengthy campaign, opponents of the law finally got their way in 1846 -- a significant triumph which was indicative of the new political power of the English middle class." By 1850, the Industrial Revolution was over and across Europe, power shifted away from landowners and towards the new urban middle classes.

…

The middle classes are all those who "got connected," soon to be most of world's population, and the lower classes are the shrinking few who cannot yet get on line. We will, over the next decades, see similar attempts by this generation of old money to throttle the growing power of this global digital middle class.
The Counter-Revolution Today
What is the twenty-first century equivalent of Britain's nineteenth century Corn Laws? How is old money fighting the revolution? There are two main strategies: property laws and simple repression.
The first is based on continuously extending the legal definition of "property" so that it appropriates any and all assets built by the digital economy. Property is entirely a political construction. Imagine an economy where upstream farmers have easy access to water and dominate agriculture.

The crucial date in nineteenth-century tariff history is 1846, the year that Britain abolished Napoleonic Wars–era tariffs on imports of grains. These so-called “Corn Laws” were at the center of political struggles in early nineteenth-century Britain, as they pitted rural interests against urban interests. Here “corn” was synonymous with grains, and the tariffs in question covered all food and cereal imports. Landlords wanted high tariffs that kept food prices high and raised their incomes. Urban manufacturers, increasingly powerful as the effects of the Industrial Revolution diffused through London, Manchester, and other cities, wanted to abolish the tariffs to reduce the cost of living. That reduction, as Karl Marx among others would argue, would allow capitalists to pay even lower wages to their workers. This debate galvanized British society and politics, with forces for and against the Corn Laws engaged in what appeared to be a bitter fight over a few import taxes, but was really about who would rule Britain and prosper in years to come.

…

This debate galvanized British society and politics, with forces for and against the Corn Laws engaged in what appeared to be a bitter fight over a few import taxes, but was really about who would rule Britain and prosper in years to come. The well-known magazine The Economist is a product of this era, founded by opponents of the Corn Laws to spread and popularize free trade views, a role which it continues to perform today. In the end, the ascendant manufacturing interests won the day: they had both the intellectual arguments and the forces of the Industrial Revolution on their side.
Once the Corn Laws were abolished in Britain, the dominant economic power of the day, the pressure was on for other European countries to follow suit. Many perceived the reform as a political and economic success in Britain. Economic commentators on the Continent pointed with awe to the large increase in Britain’s commerce and output since the repeal—although of course it was really the Industrial Revolution that deserved the bulk of the credit.

…

By the mid-1870s, most prohibitions on trade had disappeared and average tariffs on manufacturing stood at low single digits in Britain, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, and in the low teens in France and Italy, down from levels that were a multiple of these rates.3
Free trade did not win everywhere. The fight over the Corn Laws illustrates a theme we will have plenty of occasion to return to: because trade policies have important consequences for income distribution, they get entangled in much broader political contests. The economist may decry the artificiality—and therefore pointlessness—of the transaction costs that government-imposed trade barriers create, but the argument does not always carry the day when there are strong political interests or economic arguments that go in the opposite direction. In case you think those political pressures and economic arguments always derive from narrow self-interest and obscurantist doctrines—the story of the repeal of the Corn Laws is often held up as a victory of progressive ideas and liberalism over traditional nobility and authoritarian institutions—consider the experience of the United States.

pages: 346words: 90,371

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing
by
Josh Ryan-Collins,
Toby Lloyd,
Laurie Macfarlane,
John Muellbauer

Income tax was first introduced in 1799 in order to pay for weapons and equipment in preparation for the Napoleonic Wars, but much of the burden of taxation fell upon domestically produced commodities that were in high demand, such as beer, spirits, bricks, salt and glass, and imported goods such as tea, sugar and tobacco (Mathias, 2013).
In 1815 the Corn Laws were enacted, which imposed restrictions and tariffs on imported grain. The laws were intended to keep grain prices at a high level to protect English landowners from cheap foreign imports of grain following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The laws proved controversial and provided one of the first examples of the growing tension between the old landowning class and the new wealthy industrialists. While landowners strongly supported the policy, it was bitterly opposed by industrialists, who saw high food prices as a barrier to cutting wages and boosting profits.
The laws were eventually overturned in 1846 after popular movements such as the Anti-Corn Law League succeeded in turning public and elite opinion against the laws.

…

Subsidies to support certain types of land use or certain groups
Most advanced economies have a long history of protecting domestic agriculture and industry with tariffs and subsidies, typically in order to protect the interests of agricultural landowners (Chang, 2007). Throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries the government acted to protect its farmers and merchants through trade barriers and subsidies in order to maximise exports and minimise imports. This mercantilist approach to the economy was dominant until the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 (see Chapter 4).
In recent times, agricultural subsidies in Europe have been controlled by the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The CAP is an EU-wide system of payments to farmers and land managers aimed at supporting European agriculture. Introduced in 1962 it is by far the EU’s single largest common policy, today accounting for over 40% of the entire EU budget. Substantial reforms over the years have moved the CAP away from a production-oriented policy towards the current single farm payment system which is based on size of holding.

…

Ricardo warned that rising land rents would allow Britain’s landowners to monopolise the gains from economic growth. To prevent this, he argued that Britain should end its agricultural tariffs which protected the high prices landowners could charge for their products and import cheaper crops from abroad. Prime Minister Robert Peel eventually followed Ricardo’s advice when he repealed the infamous Corn Laws in 1846 (Hudson, 2008, p. 2) – we develop this story further in Chapter 4.
Others argued that economic rent should be tackled at source. Since the main source of rent was land, the privatisation of property constituted a form of arbitrary enrichment at the expense of wider society. Nineteenth century socialists such Ferdinand Lassalle and Pierre-Jean Proudhon argued that private property should be abolished and that ‘property is theft’ (Proudhon, 2005, p. 55).

At Manchester, the mood of some of the crowd was so hostile that Wellington, who had only gone there reluctantly, remained in the safety of the carriage with his entourage rather than face the protesters, fearing that his presence might trigger another Peterloo, the nearby massacre of anti-Corn Law demonstrators by soldiers eleven years previously. On this historic day for Britain, and in fact the world, the great conqueror of Napoleon was unable to win over his own people and left Manchester defeated by their show of strength.
It was not so much Luddite fear of the machine that had stimulated the crowd’s anger but rather a wider antipathy to Wellington’s government which, despite the all-too-obvious penury and suffering of large sections of the population, was adamantly resisting any attempts at social reform. The fact that many of the protesters held banners advocating ‘Vote by ballot’ and ‘No to the Corn Laws’32 suggests that it was not opposition to the railway that had attracted their ire.

…

The railways had not been the only beneficiaries of unwise investments. Early in 1847, with the Corn Laws abolished, the price of corn began to rise; then in May, when the speculative bubble burst, it fell by 40 per cent over a few days. Banks who had lent on the basis of the high prices were in trouble and both dealers and their bankers quickly started going bankrupt. Interest rates doubled from 3.5 per cent in January to 7 per cent in May and reached 10 per cent in November. This not only killed off any speculative potential for railway shares but also threw the economy into depression. The collapse of the mania, therefore, was not so much the cause of the downturn but rather one of its consequences, intensified by the changes brought about by the repeal of the Corn Laws.
It is easy to exaggerate the damaging aspects of the mania because they affected so many people, but in the long term the positive consequences outweigh the negative.

…

It was then merely a description of a firework, occasionally used as a weapon of war, rather than a vehicle used for space travel.
26 There are also many replicas dotted around the world, including one at the National Rail Museum in York.
27 6 October 1829.
28 Quoted in Ferneyhough, Liverpool & Manchester Railway, p. 59.
29 Quoted in ibid., p. 64.
30 The Times, 17 September 1830.
31 Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination, Yale University Press, 1999, p. 31.
32 The Corn Laws, first introduced in 1815 and finally abolished in 1846, kept wheat prices artificially high, protecting landowners from foreign competition and making food more expensive.
33 Indeed, Britain is one of the few countries with a fenced railway, in contrast to, say, the United States where huge freight trains often rumble along main streets or even people’s backyards.
34 In the introduction to Ferneyhough, Liverpool & Manchester Railway, p. xii.

Small government was a radical, progressive proposition. Between 1660 and 1846, in a vain attempt to control food prices by prescription, the British government had enacted an astonishing 127 Corn Laws, imposing not just tariffs, but rules about storage, sale, import, export and quality of grain and bread. In 1815, to protect landowners as grain prices fell from Napoleonic wartime highs, it had banned the import of all grain if the price fell below eighty shillings a quarter (twenty-eight pounds). This led to an impassioned pamphlet from the young theorist of free trade David Ricardo, but in vain (his friend and supporter of the Corn Law, Robert Malthus, was more persuasive). It was not until the 1840s, when the railways and the penny post enabled Cobden and John Bright to stir up a mass campaign against the laws on behalf of the working class, that the tide turned.

…

The mob that surrounded King George III’s carriage as he went to open Parliament in 1795 was demanding free trade in corn and the lifting of multiple and detailed regulations about the sale of bread. The rioters who broke into Lord Castlereagh’s house in 1815 were against protectionism. The peaceful demonstration in Manchester that was charged by cavalry in 1819 – the ‘Peterloo massacre’ – was in favour of free trade as well as political reform. The Chartists who spearheaded working-class consciousness were founding members of the Anti-Corn Law League.
Or take Richard Cobden, the great champion of free trade responsible more than anybody else for that extraordinary spell between 1840 and 1865 when Britain set the world an example and unilaterally and forcefully dismantled the tariffs that entangled the globe. (Cobden comes close to being a Great Man.) He was a passionate pacifist, prepared to make himself unpopular for opposing the Opium War and the Crimean War, deeply committed to the cause of the poor, heckled as a dangerous radical when he first spoke in the House of Commons, and independent enough to refuse to serve as a government minister under two prime ministers, and to refuse a baronetcy from a monarch he disapproved of.

…

It was not until the 1840s, when the railways and the penny post enabled Cobden and John Bright to stir up a mass campaign against the laws on behalf of the working class, that the tide turned. With the famine in Ireland in 1845, even the Tory leader Robert Peel had to admit defeat.
Cobden’s astonishing campaign against the Corn Laws, then against tariff protection more generally, succeeded eventually in persuading not just much of the country, and most intellectuals, but the leading politicians of the day, especially William Ewart Gladstone. The great reforming chancellor and prime minister championed all sorts of progressive causes, from the plight of the poor to home rule for Ireland, and in economics he was a convinced free trader, who steadily shrank the size of the state. In the end Cobden and his allies even won over the French. Cobden persuaded Napoleon III of the virtues of free trade, and himself negotiated the first international free-trade treaty in 1860, the so-called Cobden–Chevalier Treaty.

So economists often step beyond their role as engineers of economic policy and become advocates. David Ricardo, for example, was an early campaigner for free trade. He was encouraged by his friend, James Mill, to run for parliament; he won a seat in 1819 when he campaigned for repeal of the Corn Laws, which severely restricted the import of grain. Ricardo’s theories had demonstrated clearly that the Corn Laws were shoveling money into the pockets of landlords at the expense of everyone else in the country. Ricardo was not content simply to observe the effects of the Corn Laws, he wanted to abolish them.
Economists come to similar conclusions today about protectionist laws, which, as we will see in chapter 9, protect privileged pressure groups at the expense of the rest of us in the developed world and the developing world alike.

In fact, one
particular machine, Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule,
hooked up to a Boulton & Watt steam engine, would
repeatedly stretch and wind cotton thread and yarn until
it was as “smooth as silk,” like Kessler Whiskey. No one
making clothes at home anywhere could match these mills
for either cost or quality in terms of smoothness.
But landowners who controlled Parliament, and these
farmers, who didn’t know their ashes from their bellows,
passed the Corn Laws. These tariffs set minimum prices on
agriculture and kept out cheap corn and grain from the
Continent (read, France). Workers started starving because
they were not making enough in the factory to pay for now
expensive bread. But factory owners couldn’t raise wages
because they were having trouble selling their manufactured goods overseas. Why? Because the French and Germans were paying for these goods with their wheat and
corn, and the British taxed them out of affordability.

…

With any foresight, the landowners should have
dumped their unproﬁtable farms and invested the proceeds
in highly proﬁtable joint stock companies making pottery,
shirts and potbelly stoves. England should have gladly
bought French wheat and Dutch ﬂowers and German barley and hops so that consumers in these countries could
have turned around with the money they received and
bought British manufactured goods. There was no substitute. Once you go silky smooth, you never go back. The
Corn Laws foolishly lasted until 1846.
So, go ahead, buy that Beemer so that Germans can
afford to buy our software.
Wait a second, I hear you screaming, “The U.S. is running
trade deﬁcits as deep as the Mariana Trench, $500 billion a
year or more.” Relax—it’s just money, and funny money at
Why It’s Imperative to Drive a Beemer
that. You see, using industrial-era measurement tools,
“money out, goods in,” the common perception is that consumers in the U.S. are running these massive trade deﬁcits,
mortgaging their future and putting the health and wellbeing of the U.S. in the hands of devious foreign strangers—
to xenophobes, are there any other kind?

…

But never underestimate the ability of policy makers to
stick with oxymoronic conventional wisdom. Even if the
dollar stays where it is and we go to $6 trillion in trade
deﬁcits, our stock and bond markets might be worth $50,
$60, $70 trillion, double or triple today’s value, run up by
margin chasers. Just about everything about this margin
surplus model is upside down.
The modern U.S. has farm bills and textile quotas and
on and off steel tariffs like the British Corn Laws, not to
mention late-model-car ﬂamers. How dumb. Because of
our margin surpluses, big trade deﬁcits are our just dessert.
These foreign-made consumer items are our gold. Let them
277
278
Running Money
ﬂow. Tariffs, quotas and subsidies will return us to an
industrial age. No thanks. Foreigners sweat and toil to
make our physical delights, in exchange for our intellectual
output. It doesn’t get any better than this.

The eighteenth century British Empire, before the loss of the American colonies, had been a self-contained economic system, protected by tariffs, producing its own raw materials, providing its own markets, shipping its own products in its own vessels. The Corn Laws kept foreign competition to a minimum: the Navigation Acts ensured a British monopoly of trade throughout the empire. Now the economic arguments for such a system seemed to be discredited. The progressive theory now was Free Trade, which would allow the goods of all nations to flow without tariffs and restrictions all over the globe, and seemed to make the possession of colonies obsolete. With Great Britain mistress both of the means of production and the means of distribution, was not the whole world her market-place? Why bother with the expense and worry of colonies? Free Trade was not yet accepted British policy, but already powerful lobbies were pressing for the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Navigation Acts, and deriding the idea of empire.

…

As the victorious British proceeded with their experiments of political reform, as the thrilling new railways crept across the island—‘the velocity is delightful’, reported Charles Greville the diarist, dubiously taking the Liverpool train that year—as the statesmen of England concerned themselves with the settlement of Europe, and the dumpy young Queen timorously submitted to the burdens of her office—‘very few have more real good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have’—as Dickens got on with Oliver Twist and Landseer started Dignity and Impudence and Darwin worked up his notes on the voyage of the Beagle—as Cobden stormed on about the Corn Laws, and Charles Barry perfected his designs for the new Houses of Parliament, and the coal-grimed girls dragged their wagons through the stifling mine-shafts, and Gladstone settled down to his treatise on Church and State—as this most fascinating of island states entered upon the thirty-sixth reign of its ancient monarchy, the possession of an overseas empire seemed irrelevant to its wealth, dignity and interest.

…

Politically individualism was the fashionable doctrine, and economically laissez-faire was all the rage—in the matter of famine as in all else, the less the State interfered, the better. Sir Robert Peel, who was the Tory Prime Minister during the first months of the famine, did buy £100,000 worth of Indian corn and meal in the United States, with which he hoped to prevent Irish food prices soaring: but everyone knew that he was using the issue to force through the final repeal of the Corn Laws, the supreme triumph of Free Trade, and his more virulent opponents actually disbelieved in the existence of the famine. His Government fell in 1846, and the Whigs who took over, under the dwarfish and canny Lord John Russell, were even more resolute Individualists. Abetted and advised by the devout Free Trader Charles Trevelyan, permanent head of the Treasury, the British Government decided that if the potato crop failed again the imperial Power would interfere no more in the natural progress of affairs, would import no more food, but would leave the control of the disaster to the forces of private enterprise.

He spent money as if it might go out of fashion: on mistresses, on illegitimate children, on suing his father-in-law’s executors, on buying his way into the Order of the Garter, on opposing the Great Reform Bill and the Repeal of the Corn Laws - on anything he felt was compatible with his standing as a duke of the realm and the living embodiment of The Land. He prided himself on ‘resisting any measure injurious to the agricultural interests, no matter by what Government it should be brought forward’. Indeed, he resigned as Lord Privy Seal in Sir Robert Peel’s government rather than support Corn Law Repeal.10 By 1845, however - even before the mid-century slump in grain prices, in other words - his debts were close to overwhelming him. With a gross annual income of £72,000, he was spending £109,140 a year and had accumulated debts of £1,027,282.11 Most of his income was absorbed by interest payments (with rates on some of his debts as high as 15 per cent) and life insurance premiums on a policy that was probably his creditors’ best hope of seeing their money.12 Yet there was to be one final folly.

…

As Miss Demolines says in Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset, ‘the land can’t run away’.an This was why so many nineteenth-century investors - local solicitors, private banks and insurance companies - were attracted to mortgages as a seemingly risk-free investment. By contrast, the borrower’s sole security against the loss of his property to such creditors is his income. Unfortunately for the great landowners of Victorian Britain, that suddenly fell away. From the late 1840s onwards, the combination of increasing grain production around the world, plummeting transport costs and falling tariff barriers - exemplified by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 - eroded the economic position of landowners. As grain prices slid from a peak of $3 a bushel in 1847 to a nadir of 50 cents in 1894, so did the income from agricultural land. Rates of return on rural property slumped from 3.65 per cent in 1845 to just 2.51 per cent in 1885.8 As The Economist put it: ‘No security was ever relied upon with more implicit faith, and few have lately been found more sadly wanting than English land.’

More than that, the revolution gave the cities a deep suspicion of much of the countryside for its supposed royalist sympathies: the new republican France was aware of its peasant roots but determinedly and sophisticatedly urban. In England, too, there was a political dimension to the division between the conservatism of the country and the radical ideas born in cities. It was in Manchester that the agitation began that led the Anti-Corn Law League to campaign for fairer grain prices. Birmingham nurtured the Liberal caucus. The Independent Labour party was founded in Bradford. Apart from a few leafy enclaves of prosperity, cities like Manchester, Bradford and Newcastle became the sort of places where you could have pinned a red rosette to a donkey and seen it elected.
The intriguing question is why this rock-solid powerbase did not result in a new idea of England.

…

T. S. Eliot, ‘Lancelot Andrewes’, in Essays on Style and Content, p. 14.
5. Robert Runcie, ‘Lecture on the 1400th Anniversary of the Mission of St Augustine to Canterbury’, 27 February 1997.
6. Like many of Melbourne’s bons mots (e.g. ‘While I cannot be a pillar of the church, I must be regarded as a buttress, because I support it from the outside’ or his question after cabinet discussions on Corn Law reform ‘Now, is it to lower the price of corn, or isn’t it? It is not much matter which we say, but mind, we must all say the same’) the remark is attributed. G. W. E. Russell, Collections and Recollections, Chap. 6.
7. The talk is reprinted in The Spirit of England, Allen & Unwin, 1942, pp. 74–9.
8. See Margot Lawrence, ‘Tudor English Today’, in English Today, October 1986.
9. A survey of 360 priests ordained in 1990 revealed that one quarter considered themselves ‘not well informed’ about the Book of Common Prayer, while only 16 said that their worship at theological college had been mainly taken from the BCP.

All the same, only a legal pedant would dispute the boast in Utopia Limited: that Victorian Britain gave birth to the modern company. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the leaders of the world’s most important economy labored to free up its commercial laws. Parliament made the currency convertible to gold (1819), relaxed the restrictive Combination labor laws (1824), opening the East India Company’s markets to competition (1834), and eventually repealed the protectionist Corn Laws (1846).
They also began to tackle the issue of company law. In 1825, parliament finally repealed the vexatious Bubble Act. Reformers called for the statutory recognition of unincorporated companies, but conservative judges were skeptical. Lord Eldon, for example, maintained that it was an offense against the common law to try to act as a corporation without a private act of parliament or a royal charter.16 Despite attempts to speed up the process of obtaining charters, it could still be expensive—one estimate put the cost at £402—and fraught with political risk.17
The crucial change was the railways, and their demands for large agglomerations of capital.

…

The 1844 act allowed companies to dispense with the need to get a special charter, and be incorporated by the simple act of registration.22 But it did not include the crucial ingredient of automatic limited liability.
Limited liability was still anathema to many liberals. Adam Smith, remember, had been adamant that the owner-managed firm was a purer economic unit: the only way the joint-stock firm could compete was through the “subsidy” of limited liability. Some of the industrialists who had helped get rid of the Corn Laws were suspicious.23 Surely entrepreneurs could raise the necessary sums by tapping family savings and plowing back the firm’s earnings? Wouldn’t limited liability just impose the risk of doing business on suppliers, customers, and lenders (a complaint that modern economists later echoed)? And wouldn’t it attract the lowest sort of people into business? The majority of established manufacturers, most of whom were located far from London, were against the new measure.24 So, according to Walter Bagehot, were the rich, who thought the poor would reap the biggest rewards.

We would be benefited by dispensing with our tariffs even if other countries did not.’2 We would of course be benefited even more if they reduced theirs but our benefiting does not require that they reduce theirs. Self interests coincide and do not conflict.
I believe that it would be far better for us to move to free trade unilaterally, as Britain did in the nineteenth century when it repealed the corn laws. We, as they did, would experience an enormous accession of political and economic power. We are a great nation and it ill behooves us to require reciprocal benefits from Luxembourg before we reduce a tariff on Luxembourg products, or to throw thousands of Chinese refugees suddenly out of work by imposing import quotas on textiles from Hong Kong. Let us live up to our destiny and set the pace not be reluctant followers.

As Giovanni Arrighi pointed out, an analogous corporate model was emerging at the same time in Germany, and the two countries—the United States and Germany—ended up spending most of the first half of the next century battling over which would take over from the declining British empire and establish its own vision for a global economic and political order. We all know who won. Arrighi makes another interesting point here. Unlike the British Empire, which had taken its free market rhetoric seriously, eliminating its own protective tariffs with the famous Anti–Corn Law Bill of 1846, neither the German or American regimes had ever been especially interested in free trade. The Americans in particular were much more concerned with creating structures of international administration. The very first thing the United States did, on officially taking over the reins from Great Britain after World War II, was to set up the world’s first genuinely planetary bureaucratic institutions in the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and GATT, later to become the WTO.

…

Obviously, the planetary bureaucracy remained in place, but policies like IMF-imposed structural adjustment ended, and Argentina’s writing down of its loans in 2002, under intense pressure from social movements, set off a chain of events that effectively ended the Third World debt crisis.
29. The League of Nations and the UN up until the seventies were basically talking-shops.
30. In England, for instance, the anti–Corn Law legislation eliminating British tariff protections, which is seen as initiating the liberal age, was introduced by Conservative Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, mainly famous for having created the first British police force.
31. I was reminded of this a few years ago by none other than Julian Assange, when a number of Occupy activists appeared on his TV show The World Tomorrow. Aware that many of us were anarchists, he asked us what he considered a challenging question: say you have a camp, and there are some people playing the drums all night and keeping everyone awake, and they won’t stop, what do you propose to do about it?

The man in question, Johann Friedrich Bottger, made no gold, but perfected a colleague’s technique for making fine porcelain in the hope that this would win him back his freedom. So Augustus locked him even more securely in a hilltop castle at Meissen and put him to work churning out teapots and vases. In short, competition was a grand incentive to European industrialisation, and a brake on bureaucratic suffocation, at the national as well as the corporate level.
Repeal the corn laws again
The greatest beneficiaries of European political fragmentation were the Dutch. By 1670, uncommanded by emperors and even fragmented among themselves, the Dutch so dominated European international trade that their merchant marine was bigger than that of France, England, Scotland, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain and Portugal – combined. They brought grain from the Baltic, herrings from the North Sea, whale blubber from the Arctic, fruit and wine from southern Europe, spices from the Orient and of course their own manufactures to whoever wanted them.

…

But because this was not monolithic China, the baton was picked up by others, especially the British.
Victorian Britain’s great good fortune was that at the moment of industrial take-off Robert Peel embraced free trade, whereas Yong-Le had banned it. Between 1846 and 1860, Britain unilaterally adopted a string of measures to open its markets to free trade to a degree unprecedented in history. It abolished the corn laws, terminated the navigation acts, removed all tariffs and agreed trade treaties with France and others incorporating the ‘most favoured nation’ principle – that any liberalisation applied to all trading parties. This spread tariff reduction like a virus through the countries of the world and genuine global free trade arrived at last – a planetary Phoenician experiment. So at the crucial moment America could specialise in providing food and fibre to Britain and Europe, which could further specialise in providing manufactures for the consumers of the world.

These men either had fixed pitches, or were flying piemen, walking the streets carrying a tray about three feet square, either on their heads or hanging from a strap around their necks. In the 1840s, the Corn Laws kept the price of flour high and, with it, the cost of pies.96 To maintain their price at the expected penny, the piemen were forced to scrimp: their pies were made with cheap shortening, or had less filling, or poor-quality meat. Many of the legends of cats’-meat, or worse, in pies spring from this period. In 1833, Sam Weller advises the horrified Mr Pickwick, ‘Wery good thing is weal pie, when you…is quite sure it ain’t kittens,’ but in summer ‘fruits is in, cats is out’. The legend of Sweeney Todd, the barber who murdered customers for his neighbour to bake into pies, was also created in the Hungry Forties. Even the repeal of the Corn Laws did not help, because once flour became cheaper, pie shops began to open, which damaged the street-trade of the piemen even further.

…

The tourist thought that the cry didn’t matter, as the sellers had regular beats and were recognized by the cry, not the content, but some of these calls do seem counter-productive.
95. Nineteenth-century muffins were, of course, not American cake-like muffins. The modern ‘English muffin’ (an American anomaly too) is the descendant of what was being sold here. Made from a yeast batter, they were cooked on a griddle rather than baked, then cut in half, and served hot, spread with butter.
96. The Corn Laws were passed in 1815, as Britain moved to a peacetime economy after a quarter of a century of war. The import of grain (corn in this context generally meaning wheat, but legally all grain) from abroad was prohibited unless the home price rose above a certain – astronomical – level, to protect the home markets. Even though the laws brought immense hardship, repeal did not come until 1849, such was the hostility of the great landowners to competition from abroad.
97.

The political scientist Philip Cowley counters the charge that under Labour the Commons became more supine. He says the picture was in fact one of growing activism and rebelliousness by backbenchers. MPs got several full-dress debates on Iraq; Blair could have lost the votes. In March 2003, 139 Labour MPs did vote against the war, which Cowley said was the largest rebellion seen under any party on any issue since the repeal of the Corn Laws under Sir Robert Peel. Big commitments on schools or on Trident only passed thanks to Tory support. His research found the class of 2005 Labour MPs the most rebellious of any since the war, but in truth, few rebellions threatened government business.
Labour were also conservative about how to pay for politics. Reform was never going to be easy because the antidote to plutocracy was state funding.

Yet the underlying idea is still very much of its time in the conclusion Montesquieu draws from it relating to the workings of human passions and interests: ‘And it is fortunate for men to be in a situation in which, though their passions may prompt them to be wicked [méchants], they have nevertheless an interest in not being so.’
The high tide of such liberal internationalism came in the mid-nineteenth century with the textile manufacturer and politician Richard Cobden, who, with John Bright, led the free trade campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws, the system of tariffs that protected English landowners from foreign grain imports. Cobden was a pacifist and anti-imperialist. In his most idealistic and visionary speech on the case for free trade, he made it clear that securing peace through international trade was far more important to him than any economic consideration, although many of his supporters in the business community were probably more interested in the capacity of free trade to cheapen labour:
I have been accused of looking too much to material interests.

…

In Tennyson’s poem of unrequited love, ‘Locksley Hall’, the narrator has an extraordinary prophetic vision of aerial warfare which is then succeeded by a peace in which an enlightened global parliament rules:
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;
Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.105
The immediate consequence of Cobden’s victory in the campaign against the Corn Laws was an acceleration in British trade and economic growth. For Britain, at least, the rest of the century was relatively peaceful domestically. By the start of the twentieth century, meantime, Cobden’s idealism had been developed by the British journalist and politician Norman Angell into a more general theory about the futility of war in conditions of economic interdependence. In a book called The Great Illusion, which appeared in 1910 during the first period of globalisation in the world economy, he argued that the costs of victory always outweighed the gains; and not just because of the loss of life and destruction of wealth.

No. 6, east side
During the nineteenth century the property was the official home of the Lord Chancellor, its best-known incumbent of the period being Lord Eldon, who held the office from 1804 to 1815 and was characterized acerbically by the poet Shelley in the lines ‘next came Fraud, and he had on / Like Eldon, an ermined gown’ in his vitriolic 1819 work, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’.
Eldon, as Attorney-General, had antagonized opponents by suspending Habeas Corpus between 1794 and 1801, prosecuting members of the radical London Corresponding Society, and helping pass the Corn Laws, which protected landowners from cheap imports of grain and ensured an artificially high price for bread. In 1815 he bore the brunt of the anti-Corn Law protests when a mob besieged his house for three weeks. When at one point a rioter broke into the property and came face to face with Eldon the latter thundered: ‘If you don’t mind what you are about you will be hanged,’ which led the man to reply: ‘Perhaps so, but I think it looks now as if you will be hanged first.’
Bloomsbury Square
Bloomsbury Square, the first junction of roads in London to be called a square, was created as Southampton Square in 1657 by the Earl of Southampton with the unusual layout of housing for wealthy families on three sides and servants’ houses on the fourth.

…

Clerkenwell Green
Last Sunday evening I spent on Clerkenwell Green – a great assembly place for radical meetings – George Gissing, letter to his sister (1887)
Clerkenwell’s village green, its appearance more like that of a continental piazza than a London square, was the medieval setting for the parish clerks’ mystery plays and was where rebels from the North camped out during the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt before destroying the nearby priory of St John. In the nineteenth century the Green became a popular setting for political demonstrations, and was where William Cobbett, author of Rural Rides (1830), spoke against the Corn Laws in February 1826. During the Chartist agitation of 1842 the prime minister, Robert Peel, banned public meetings from taking place here, but the Green later came to be used for rallies again: in 1867 to protest against the proposed hanging of three Fenians; in 1871 in support of the Paris Commune; and, most famously of all, on 13 November 1887, when Annie Besant and William Morris addressed a large crowd in favour of the right to assembly and marched to Trafalgar Square where a riot that became known as Bloody Sunday took place.

…

Carlton Club (1835-1940), No. 94
The Conservatives’ main social and political club, which was formed at 2 Carlton House Terrace after the party’s poor showing at the 1832 general election, moved here three years later. Despite the energy members expended in creating a strong party organization based around the three tenets of the long-serving Tory prime minister Lord Liverpool – defence of the Crown, Church and Constitution – the party was torn apart in 1846 when Tory PM Robert Peel repealed the Corn Laws, a move opposed by the majority of members. In the 1870s the Carlton was replaced as the most powerful bastion of Conservatism by the party’s Central Office, and in 1886 the windows of the Pall Mall building were smashed by demonstrators following a march by the London United Workmen’s Committee in demand of jobs. At a meeting in the Carlton in October 1922 the Tories withdrew their support for the Coalition government of the Liberal David Lloyd George, which led a group of Tory MPs to form the 1922 Committee, the major powerbase for backbench MPs since.

The answer was ‘the establishment of a new society, one no longer based on class antagonisms’. Therefore, the crucial issue for Poland was ‘the victory of the English proletarians over the English bourgeoisie … Poland must be liberated not in Poland but in England.’103 This reduction of the political to the social was, he thought, happening everywhere. Something similar had occurred in England, where ‘in all questions from the Reform Bill until the abolition of the Corn Laws’, political parties fought about nothing except ‘changes in property rights’, while in Belgium the struggle of liberalism with Catholicism was ‘a struggle of industrial capital with large landed property’.104
Engels expressed the point more crudely. He could not ‘forbear an ironical smile’ when he observed ‘the terrible earnestness, the pathetic enthusiasm with which the bourgeois strive to achieve their aims’.

…

Thus the anxiety of the upper classes in Europe is embittered by the conviction that their very victories over revolution have been but instrumental in providing the material conditions in 1857 for the ideal tendencies of 1848.149
For the Tribune, all this was grist to the mill. The politics of Dana and of Horace Greeley, the proprietor of the Tribune, were protectionist. Free trade, championed by England – especially after the Repeal of the Corn Laws – was, they argued, the means by which England dominated world commerce, and through its enforcement of the gold standard acted as the world’s banker. The economic basis of the Tribune’s protectionism was most clearly articulated by the American economist Henry Carey, who like his father, a successful Philadelphia publisher, had developed Alexander Hamilton’s argument for the protection of infant industries in the face of British commercial superiority.

…

Similarly, his discussions of commercial crisis made frequent and explicit reference to the deficiency of free trade and monetarist interpretations of the fluctuations of the economy. On 9 September 1853, he highlighted the fallacies of Peel’s 1844 Bank Charter Act, maintaining that the Act would aggravate the severity of the approaching crisis.159 In 1855, he argued that the crisis in trade and industry had ‘shut up the mouths of those shallow Free Traders who for years had gone on preaching that since the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, glutted markets were impossible’. Furthermore, ‘the glut’ had been made more acute by the attempt to dump goods in newly developing extra-European markets: ‘India and China, glutted though they were, continued to be used as outlets – as also California and Australia. When the English manufacturers could no longer sell their goods at home, or would not do so rather than depress prices, they resorted to the absurd expedient of consigning them abroad, especially to India, China, Australia and California.’160 In 1857, after the suspension of the Bank Charter Act as a result of its failure to alleviate the commercial crisis, he once again observed, ‘we were told that British Free Trade would change all this, but if nothing else is proved it is at least clear that the Free-Trade doctors are nothing but quacks.’161 In a lead article in August 1858, he repeated his attack upon the monetarist approach.

During this period, government had an active role in stimulating demand
for both textiles (e.g. military uniforms) and engineering products (e.g. guns and
armour), and when this demand ceased at the end of the war a serious recession
ensued. Indeed, some military historians turn the argument around, and maintain that military procurement, by setting challenging targets for entrepreneurs,
stimulated investment and innovation in precision-made factory products.
Furthermore, Free Trade was not official government policy until the repeal of
the Corn Laws in 1846, and the Prime Minister, Robert Peel, who pushed through
this reform, split his political party in the process. Although Richard Cobden,
John Bright and other members of the ‘Manchester School’ had been vociferous
lobbyists for Free Trade, it was neither their free market ideology nor the
prospective benefit to industry that finally swayed Peel and his followers, but
the benefits to the workers themselves.

…

Moreover, despite the collaboration, there was no
rationalization: there remained two stations at Cromer and two at North
Walsham—not to mention two at Fakenham, and separate stations at Kings
Lynn and South Lynn. Although an expensive connecting line between the two
systems was built at Great Yarmouth, there remained three separate stations
there—Southtown, Beach, and Vauxhall (the only survivor).
East Anglia also beneWted from local initiatives. Although agricultural prosperity in Britain declined after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and the onset of
the ‘Great Depression’ in 1873, Norfolk and SuVolk, having better soil fertility and
proximity to London, fared better than most regions. They were able to ‘trade up’
to higher value-added products such as vegetables. Local initiatives for connecting
nearby market towns to one another allowed Sudbury, Bury, Thetford, Dereham,
Wymondham, and SwaVham to become small hubs.

Among the first of those prepared to voice this possibility was the MP John Lewis Ricardo, nephew of David Ricardo, the great political economist, and himself a convinced opponent of the Corn Laws. The younger Ricardo was the chairman of one of the early telegraph companies – telegraphy being by far the most advanced and exciting commercial science of the day. He had found himself forced to buy up patents to forestall litigation, and was therefore inclined by his own experience to see them as monopolistic obstacles to laissezfaire. He pointed out – as many would repeat in the next generation – that patents had not been required to stimulate the invention of printing, gunpowder, or paper. Only “trivial” improvements tended to be patented, he claimed. In the end, Ricardo denied outright that patents accelerated invention. He maintained instead that they were an unnecessary impediment – the equivalent, in effect, to the navigation acts or the Corn Laws themselves.
Ricardo’s was at first a lonely view.

…

With Armstrong on their side, the antipatent campaigners boasted one of the most charismatic personifications of industrial invention. But he was also one of the most controversial – for there was another side to his story of wizardry, entrepreneurship, and perseverance, as the ensuing debates would reveal all too clearly.
But Armstrong, Grove, and MacFie were only the leaders of a movement that had representatives in every class, region, and profession. Laissezfaire ultras, many of them veterans from Cobden’s anti–Corn Law campaign, were one constituency; Ricardo was one of these, and another J. E. Thorold Rogers, professor of political economy at Oxford and of economic science and statistics at King’s College, London. Such figures created a political economy of antipatenting. And powerful allies arose in the legal, manufacturing, engineering, and scientific fields too. In the law, Sir Roundell Palmer, soon to be solicitor general and lord chancellor, was a somewhat wavering supporter.

For this we must go back in time to the nineteenth century. One example, Japan in the first thirty years after the Meiji Restoration in 1867, we leave for Chapter 2.
Two other examples are Great Britain and the United States. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was one of the early blows in the battle to end government restrictions on industry and trade. The final victory in that battle came seventy years later, in 1846, with the repeal of the so-called Corn Laws—laws that imposed tariffs and other restrictions on the importation of wheat and other grains, referred to collectively as "corn." That ushered in three-quarters of a century of complete free trade lasting until the outbreak of World War I and completed a transition that had begun decades earlier to a highly limited government, one that left every resident of Britain, in Adam Smith's words quoted earlier, "perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men."

…

Economists often do disagree, but that has not been true with respect to international trade. Ever since Adam Smith there has been virtual unanimity among economists, whatever their ideological position on other issues, that international free trade is in the best interest of the trading countries and of the world. Yet tariffs have been the rule. The only major exceptions are nearly a century of free trade in Great Britain after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, thirty years of free trade in Japan after the Meiji Restoration, and free trade in Hong Kong today. The United States had tariffs throughout the nineteenth century and they were raised still higher in the twentieth century, especially by the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill of 1930, which some scholars regard as partly responsible for the severity of the subsequent depression. Tariffs have since been reduced by repeated international agreements, but they remain high, probably higher than in the nineteenth century, though the vast changes in the kinds of items entering international trade make a precise comparison impossible.

Under the principle of “less eligibility,” the explicit aim of the 1834 law was to stigmatize idleness and force the out-of-work to accept any position available, regardless of the wages it paid. After subjecting the landless laborers and urban poor to the harsh disciplines of the market, the Victorian free market reformers administered similar shock treatment to farmers. In 1846, following an epic political battle, the Corn Laws, which, through a system of tariffs, protected British grain growers from foreign competition, were abolished, opening up the British market to cheaper foodstuffs produced in the American Midwest.
The classical economists justified their recommendations on economic grounds, but there was also a strong moral element to their teachings. Laissez-faire was the practical application of a philosophy that placed great emphasis on self-reliance and freedom of choice.

Firms in rail-served
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towns, such as Butler and Tanner’s in Frome or Clay’s in
Bungay, then began to undercut the London print works, and
the modern, de-centred book-printing industry took shape.
Food and drink offer further examples. The average
British diet in 1900 was very different from what it had been
in 1800. Water transport had a lot to do with this: root crops
carried along the canal network in the early decades; torrents
of cheap overseas grain after Corn Law repeal in the 1840s;
frozen meat in refrigerated ships from the New World and
Australia towards the century’s end. But the origins of the
industrial-age diet, at once more varied and more standardised than what came before, lie just as squarely with the railways. The companies themselves did not set out to change
the status quo in the kitchen, for heavy goods, minerals and
passengers all offered a bigger and surer return.

The consolidation of means of production in the hands of the
capitalists takes place at the expense of the feudal class on the one
hand and many self-employed artisans, craftsmen at ~he other end. A
struggle between the feudal and capitalist elements is a major feature
of 18th and 19th century history of many European countries and hnile
the outcome in most countries which are called developed today was in
favour of the capitalists, it took different forms. The agitation
regarding the abolition of Corn Laws and in favour of Free Trade was
the classical platform of the struggle between feudal landlords and
industrial capital in England (and like all such classical events is
partly mythological). In other countries, the feudal landlords transformed themselves into industrial capitalists often with state aid (as
in Japan after the Meiji Restoration) and even in England the feudal
elements are not entirely absent from the capitalist class to this day.

For instance, in France a lot of people were able to remain on the land, and therefore they resisted industrialization more. 36
But even after the rising bourgeoisie in England had driven millions of peasants off the land, there was a period when the population’s “right to live” still was preserved by what we would today call “welfare.” There was a set of laws in England which gave people rights, called the “Poor Laws” [initially and most comprehensively codified in 1601]—which essentially kept you alive if you couldn’t survive otherwise; they provided sort of a minimum level of subsistence, like subsidies on food and so on. And there was also something called the “Corn Laws” [dating in varying forms from the twelfth century], which gave landlords certain rights beyond those they could get on the market—they raised the price of corn, that sort of thing. And together, these laws were considered among the main impediments to the new rising British industrial class—so therefore they just had to go.
Well, those people needed an ideology to support their effort to knock out of people’s heads the idea that they had this basic right to live, and that’s what classical economics was about—classical economics said: no one has any right to live, you only have a right to what you can gain for yourself on the labor market.

…

And the founders of classical economics in fact said they’d developed a “scientific theory” of it, with—as they put it—“the certainty of the principle of gravitation.”
Alright, by the 1830s, political conditions in England had changed enough so that the rising bourgeoisie were able to kill the Poor Laws [they were significantly limited in 1832], and then later they managed to do away with the Corn Laws [in 1846]. And by around 1840 or 1845, they won the elections and took over the government. Then at that point, a very interesting thing happened. They gave up the theory, and Political Economy changed.
It changed for a number of reasons. For one thing, these guys had won, so they didn’t need it so much as an ideological weapon anymore. For another, they recognized that they themselves needed a powerful interventionist state to defend industry from the hardships of competition in the open market—as they always had in fact.

"Whatever be the soil, climate, or extent of
territory of any particular nation," Smith wrote, "the abundance or scanti-
263
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ness of its annual supply" must depend upon "the productive powers of
labor." Two centuries of economic thought later, little has been added to
those insights.
With the help of Smith and his immediate successors, mercantilism
was gradually dismantled and economic freedom spread widely In Britain,
this process reached its finale with the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws, a set
of tariffs that for many years had blocked imports of grain, keeping grain
prices and therefore landowners' rents artificially high—and elevating, of
course, the price paid by industrial wage earners for a loaf of bread. The acceptance of Smith's economics was, by then, prompting the reorganization
of commercial life in much of the "civilized" world.
Yet Smith's reputation and influence eroded as industrialization spread.

The school, especially Ricardo, emphasized that it is in the long-term interest of everyone that the greatest share of national income go to the capitalist class (that is, profits), because it is the only class that invests and generates economic growth; the working class was too poor to save and invest, while the landlord class was using its income (rents) on ‘unproductive’ luxury consumption, such as the employment of servants. According to Ricardo and his followers, the growing population in Britain was forcing the cultivation of increasingly lower-quality land, constantly raising the rents for existing (higher-quality) land. This meant that the share of profit was gradually falling, threatening investment and growth. His recommendation was to abolish the protection for grain producers (called the Corn Laws in Britain at the time) and import cheaper food from countries where good-quality land was still available, so that the share going to profits, and thus the ability of the economy to invest and grow, could be raised.
Class analysis and comparative advantage: the Classical school’s relevance for today
Despite being an old school with few current practitioners, the Classical school is still relevant for our time.

A prolonged crisis begins in the late 1820s, characterized by the factory owners’ determination to survive by de-skilling the workforce and cutting wages, and also by chaos in the banking system. Working-class resistance – the Chartist movement culminating in the General Strike of 1842 – forces the state to stabilize the economy.
But in the 1840s a successful adaptation takes place: the Bank of England gains a monopoly over the issue of banknotes; factory legislation ends the dream of replacing the skilled male workers with women and children. The Corn Laws – a protective tariff favouring the aristocracy – are abolished. Income tax is levied and the British state finally begins to function as a machine for the ruling industrial capitalists, not as a battleground between them and the old aristocracy.
In the second wave – which starts with Britain, Western Europe and North America but pulls in Russia and Japan – the downswing begins in 1873. The system tries to adapt through the creation of monopolies, with agrarian reform, an attack on skilled wages and by pulling in new migrant workers where possible as cheap labour.

Admittedly, from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, London was at the centre of the aristocratic practice of attending the court and displaying its debutantes during the ‘Season’, but, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, distinctive county, urban and regional elites could meaningfully contest London’s hegemony in various ways until the later twentieth century (for instance, via the Anti-Corn Law League or through Chamberlain’s municipal Conservatism). This kind of regional or non-London-urban elite group is, we would suggest on the basis of our data, now much weaker – if it exists at all. Having a relationship with London venues and its ‘scene’ is now fundamental to the new elite-class practices. For instance, two similar individuals, making their way in the professions, would have very different prospects according to whether they were based in London or the north of England.

Americans would
suffer from their inability to buy cheap imports, but: ‘They would gain greatly
overall because the production of those more expensive and/or inferior US
goods behind tariff walls would do wonders for their wages by increasing the
demand for their labour’. The US trade deficit has translated into a net loss of
1.4 million jobs, he has claimed.
Britain has had such a strong history of free trade, since the repeal of the
Corn Laws in 1848, that protectionist sentiments are extremely rare. Leftwingers opposed the extension of the free market during the Thatcher years
but did not query trade liberalisation — until recently. The opening shots in
the campaign to make protectionism acceptable were fired by David Marquand,
often described as one of the ‘gurus’ of Labour leader Tony Blair. The spread
of trade will cause society to fragment, he predicts, fuelling protectionism and
isolationism of the Ross Perot or Pat Buchanan type.

People’s Charter initiates the Chartist Movement; it calls for
workers’ aims such as the vote for all men over 21, equally sized constituencies, annual parliaments, and salaries for MPs. Chartist demonstrations. Parliamentary ‘blue books’ on working conditions, sanitation, pauperism begin. Thomas Hood’s ‘Song of a Shirt’.
Frederick Engels, Condition of the Working Classes in England. Foundation of the Liberation Society, working for Church disestablishment.
1845–50 Irish Famine.
Repeal of the Corn Laws, instituting era of Free Trade. Factory Act (‘Ten Hours Bill’) limits working day for women and children. Evaporated milk invented. Band of Hope Temperance Organization founded.
Year of European Revolutions: Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Venice, Milan. Sequence of Public Health Acts begins. Karl Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto. F. D. Maurice founds Christian Socialist movement. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton.

…

From 1880 his eldest son William Bramwell Booth (1856–1929) was chief of staff and, after his father’s death, general of the movement. Ball reports an informant testifying that Tressell viewed General Booth as ‘a bounder and humbug who appealed to the lowest instincts of the working class’ (Tressell of Mugsborough, p. 48). Free Trade for the last fifty years: free trade assumes that trade should
occur without the constraints of import duties, export bounties, sub- sidies, quotas, or licences. The 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws (which had excluded cheaper foreign wheat) was often understood as the symbolic initiation of Victorian free trade. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gladstone had by 1860 removed import duties on over 400 categories of goods, leaving only a few luxury items subject to tariffs. ‘Over-population!’: Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), in his influential Essay
on the Principle of Population (1798), argued that population grows faster
than food supply and that poverty was thus a condition with the force of a law of nature.
19 poverty in France?

The next morning, Tony Benn found him ‘extremely agitated’, issuing wild threats against Jenkins and talking of walking away from the party leadership, but underneath all the bluster ‘desperately insecure and unhappy’. All in all, it was a pretty pathetic spectacle of introversion and feuding, played out in the full gaze of the media and the public. And with Jenkins adamant that Britain’s European future must come before party unity, there seemed little prospect of an end to hostilities. ‘I saw it in the context of the first Reform Bill, the repeal of the Corn Laws, Gladstone’s Home Rule Bills, the Lloyd George Budget and the Parliament Bill, the Munich Agreement and the May 1940 votes,’ Jenkins wrote later.33
What finally pushed Jenkins overboard was a wheeze that Benn himself had cooked up at the end of 1970, which was for the next Labour government to call a national referendum on the issue of Europe. At first, Wilson rejected the idea outright; at the time, only Callaghan realized that it offered the ideal way to paper over Labour’s European divisions, remarking sagely: ‘Tony may be launching a little rubber life-raft which we will all be glad of in a year’s time.’

…

It is true that in some ways he anticipated Mrs Thatcher – in his provincial grammar school background, in his emphasis on entrepreneurship, in his impatience with tradition. But he was too much a creature of the system, too deeply marked by the experiences of the Depression and the war, to be a true proto-Thatcherite. His friends Denis Healey and Douglas Hurd – one Labour, one Tory – agreed that the politician he most resembled was Sir Robert Peel, who smashed his own party with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Like Peel, Heath was an industrious, earnest, terse and repressed man from outside the magic circle. Like Peel, he was a modernizer, a reformer, a pragmatist who believed that every problem had a rational solution and that reasoned argument could reconcile competing interests to the greater good. Like Peel, he saw further than many of his colleagues: in his case, his European enthusiasm marked him out as a much more visionary politician than most of his contemporaries.

Mr Pitt knew better.82
This last was a reference to the fact that when Pitt the Younger was prime minister (1783–1801), he had slashed tea duties from 119 percent to 25 percent in order to combat smuggling. It had been a very successful policy, vastly increasing the amount of tea passing through the Exchequer. These were different times, though, with the price of all food at a premium following the wars with France. The Corn Laws, introduced in 1815 to safeguard the livelihood of British farmers, kept the price of wheat, and thence bread, artificially high. Meanwhile, duties on luxuries such as tea, wine, spirits, and tobacco were all extremely high in 1820, which doubtless contributed to the market in counterfeit versions.
Accum himself makes frequent reference to the effects of “the late French war” on food and drink, especially beer.

This system of classical imperialist capitalism, underpinned by British and American politico-economic thinking, prospered for roughly one hundred years, until the period of disintegration that started with World War I in 1914 and climaxed with the Great Depression and World War II. This age of classical capitalism could be subdivided into several subperiods, marked out by financial and military crises:
Capitalism 1.0: from 1776, the U.S. Declaration of Independence and The Wealth of Nations, to 1815, the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo
Capitalism 1.1: from 1820 to 1849
Capitalism 1.2: from 1848-49, Europe’s Year of Revolutions, the repeal of the Corn Laws, and the Navigation Acts, until the late 1860s, during the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War
Capitalism 1.3: from 1870 to 1914, the United States’ Gilded Age or the Second Industrial Revolution
Capitalism 1.4: from 1917 until 1932, the period of disintegration, when capitalism came closer to genuine collapse than ever before or since
Some of the upheavals that punctuated the transitions from one of the subperiods to another were bloody and traumatic—for example, the American Civil War and the slaughter of the Paris Commune—but they did not turn out to be systemically transformational crises of capitalism, as described in Chapter 2.

Just as importantly, Enlightenment thought, personified by Adam Smith, highlighted the dysfunctions associated with monopoly, collusion and price-rigging.3 Parliament aggressively granted the ‘enclosures’, so creating the great farming estates whose surge in productivity was the source of the financial surplus that financed the Industrial Revolution. It also systematically dismantled the internal tariffs to trade, so constructing a national market with very attractive pay-offs for the first entrepreneurial industrialists. This was symbolic of a strategic thrust that also witnessed the progressive abolition of the Navigation Acts, the repeal of the Corn Laws (which had kept corn prices artificially high), the liberalisation of companies’ right to incorporate, the widespread granting of rights to build canals and railways and the repeal of the regulations that had determined the inflows of apprentices in various trades. Industry boomed.
At this time, Britain was responsible for the creation and development of four great GPTs – the steam engine, the factory system, the railway and the iron steamship – which underpinned its industrial, imperial, military and technological pre-eminence.

And the
interest rate on consolidated British government stock, in turn, was
determined by what was happening in wider capital markets than the
local solicitor’s office, and as much by Amsterdamers as by Londoners.
The same had also long been true of the market in grain and many
other goods. The financier and economist Ricardo assumed so in his
models of trade around 1817, as though it were given, simple, obvious,
trivial, not worthy of comment. The disruptions of war and blockade
from time to time masked the convergence. Regulations, such as the
Corn Laws, or imperial schemes to subsidize West Indian landowners
with powerful friends in government, could sometimes stop it from
working. But Europe by the eighteenth century had a unified market in,
say, wheat. Fernand Braudel and Frank Spooner showed long ago in
their astonishing charts of prices that the percentage by which the
European minimum was exceeded by the maximum price fell from 570
percent in 1440 to a mere 88 percent in 1760.15 Centuries earlier the price
of gold and silver had become international, though the continued
hunger of the East for precious metals kept the divergence in value from
disappearing completely.16 Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson have
shown that in the fancier items of east-west trade the divergence was not
pronounced enough to explain the rise in their trade.17 And by 1800 and
certainly by 1850 the prices of wheat, iron, cloth, wood, coal, skins, and
many other of the less fancy materials useful to life were beginning to
cost roughly the same in St Petersburg as in London, and to a lesser
extent in New York and even in Bombay, by an economically relevant
standard of “roughly.”

The idea was to turn the Empire into a Customs Union, with common duties on all imports from outside British territory: Chamberlain’s catch-phrase for the scheme was ‘Imperial Preference’. The policy had even been tried out during the Boer War, when Canada had been exempted from a small and temporary duty on imported wheat and corn. This was yet another bid to turn the theory of Greater Britain into political practice. But to the majority of British voters it looked more like an attempt to restore the old Corn Laws and put up the price of food. The Liberals’ campaign against imperialism – now widely regarded as a term of abuse – culminated in January 1906 with one of the biggest election landslides in British history, when they swept into power with a majority of 243. Chamberlain’s vision of a people’s Empire seemed to have dissolved in the face of the old, insular fundamentals of British domestic politics: cheap bread plus moral indignation.

The lime estates were started by a remarkable man—Joseph Sturge, a devout Quaker from Birmingham who insisted he would grow his limes without the use of any slaves and with the hitherto unprecedented policy of ‘fair and just treatment of the native labourers’ as a spur to profitable production. He loaned money to the freed slaves, helped them pay for school, went to America to agitate for their freedom there. He would describe his principal interests as ‘peace, anti-slavery and temperance’, campaigned against the Corn Laws and the war in Crimea, and founded the Friends’ Sunday schools in Birmingham. The city fathers erected a fountain and a statue to his memory in Edgbaston; in Montserrat, though, there is no memorial, and the lime factories have all but closed down.
In 1885 the island sold 180,000 gallons of juice to Crosse and Blackwell, in 1928 some thirty-five puncheons went to Australia. They made lime oil, too, for perfume and soap.

Matheson greedily observed that, in China, there lived ‘a population estimated as amounting to nearly a third of the whole human race’; then as now, businessmen were beguiled by the prospect of selling to the Chinese, who, in the early nineteenth century, were likely to have formed an even greater proportion of the world’s inhabitants than they do today. (In 2010, China was estimated to constitute between a fifth and a quarter of the world’s population.) Ten years before the repeal of the British Corn Laws in 1846, Matheson invoked free trade as a justification for opening up trade with China.2
Matheson was one of those Scots who typify the dynamism and commercial acumen of the British imperialist during this period. Born in Lairg in Sutherland in 1796, he had studied Science, Law and Economics at Edinburgh University, before going to Canton in 1819 to start his career in trade. A keen disciple of Adam Smith and his free-trade ideas, he was a writer of force and passion, convinced that it was the duty of the British government ‘to make a firm and decisive demonstration in favour of our oppressed fellow-subjects in Canton’.

Chamberlain expressed disappointment that his foe had escaped when his spies sent him a telegram at his London club, telling him that the traitor had at least been prevented from speaking.14 At times it seemed as if Joe had little sense of where the clear boundaries of parliamentary and political behaviour lay, something shared with other rising stars of the new democracy.
By now he had put together in his mind a set of ideas about Britain’s problems and future solutions. Since the great battles over the Corn Laws in the 1840s, free trade had become synonymous with British power and Britain’s industrial revolution. The fundamental policy was to let in cheap food from America and Argentina to feed the cities, and leave the farmers to survive as best they could. The corn fields of Sussex had been out-shouted by the terraces of Oldham. But shrewd observers knew that once a tax on imported corn was announced in spring 1902 to help pay for the Boer War, the argument for a much larger wall around the British Empire was bound to return.

He was a voracious, obsessive hunter, killing animals en masse for pleasure, and a harsh father to his sons. In the political sphere he did far more than hold the blotter while his wife signed the state papers: he maintained a clandestine correspondence with his kinsmen in Germany, especially in Prussia, using Rothschilds Bank as a conduit for letters. He refused to stay out of controversies, and appeared in the public gallery of the House of Lords, for example, to air his views on the Corn Laws.27
Nonetheless, Albert’s ascent to the highest level of royal and aristocratic society cannot have failed to arouse some sense of satisfaction, not least because his native duchy was home to the most prestigious of publications on these matters. The Almanach de Gotha was Europe’s most authoritative genealogical guide for nearly 200 years. First issued in 1763, it listed names in three sections: I.